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dame_samara 's review for:
You've Reached Sam
by Dustin Thao
This was one of my most anticipated books of late 2021, and it ended up being super disappointing for me.
If I could go back and edit this book I would remove a moment in the beginning of the book where Julie's mom, goes on about the government being after her and spying on them, conspiracies' and whatnot. Because it very much felt like a hook for a plot that this book didn't have. About some government hiding the afterlife, a way to talk to the dead, honestly anything. It wasn't even a red herring, looking back it feel completely out of left field.
I could have let this go, but honestly I had a moment where I thought Thao had gone a different route the the above mention Sci-Fi route.
The ending just didn't hit home and I partially blame my love of Makoto Shinkai's works like 5 Centimeters per Second, that lack what we typically consider a satisfying ending. But this book especially in the later third gave me flashbacks to Shinkai's Voices of a Distant Star with the slow loss of contact.
Julie's phone it could have been in many ways a parallel to her initial loss of Sam, a do-over if you may. Because so often we don't have the opportunity to say goodbye to someone before they pass, to tell them that we love them. But that doesn't make it less true.
Also can we just call out these Adults for not getting a single one of these kids in to see a grief therapist, or even a school councilor touching base with Julie when she came back.
If I could go back and edit this book I would remove a moment in the beginning of the book where Julie's mom, goes on about the government being after her and spying on them, conspiracies' and whatnot. Because it very much felt like a hook for a plot that this book didn't have. About some government hiding the afterlife, a way to talk to the dead, honestly anything. It wasn't even a red herring, looking back it feel completely out of left field.
I could have let this go, but honestly I had a moment where I thought Thao had gone a different route the the above mention Sci-Fi route.
Spoiler
When Julie is trying to call Sam with Mika there and it just rings and rings. She has the thought, what if this is just a hallucination. It was a missed opportunity for it not to be, in my opinion. I at no point felt like Julie really worked through her grief and having such an obvious sign of it could have been a trigger for her to seek the help she most definitely needed. Even at the end of this book canonically. Grief induced hallucinations are not uncommon and I think approaching them as such could have been really interesting in YA Fiction.The ending just didn't hit home and I partially blame my love of Makoto Shinkai's works like 5 Centimeters per Second, that lack what we typically consider a satisfying ending. But this book especially in the later third gave me flashbacks to Shinkai's Voices of a Distant Star with the slow loss of contact.
Spoiler
In some ways a Shinkai style ending was just within reach, with the destruction ofJulie's phone it could have been in many ways a parallel to her initial loss of Sam, a do-over if you may. Because so often we don't have the opportunity to say goodbye to someone before they pass, to tell them that we love them. But that doesn't make it less true.
Also can we just call out these Adults for not getting a single one of these kids in to see a grief therapist, or even a school councilor touching base with Julie when she came back.